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The Anti-Defamation League called on news pundits to stop comparing U.S. gun control laws to Nazi Germany

The Anti-Defamation League has called on pundits to stop comparing recent gun control legislation to laws passed in Nazi Germany under Adolf Hitler, saying the references are "historically inaccurate and offensive" to Holocaust survivors.

News outlets like Fox News, the Drudge Report and WorldNetDaily.com invoked the era of Nazi rule in Germany to argue that the proposed legislation impinges on Second Amendment rights.

"We've even seen it from Bob Schieffer," Todd Gutnick, an ADL spokesman, told TheWrap. "But we're mainly seeing it from those who are opposed to additional gun control, and that would probably be mainly conservative-type media and/or pundits."

Deborah Lauter, the ADL's civil rights director, said pundits make the Nazi comparisons out of ignorance.

"The further we get from the Holocaust, there's really a lack of understanding about the enormity of evil in what happened," she told TheWrap. "I guess people are just more cavalier when they use those references, people use it for shock value. It does get attention."

Some examples the ADL listed include:

Jan. 9: The Drudge Report, under the headline "White House Threatens 'Executive Orders' on Guns," featured photos of Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin.

Jan. 9: During an interview on the Fox News Channel, Lars Larson suggested that, "…if the president does it that way, everybody in America will be required to go in and give fingerprints…. It will be 'your papers, please' like Nazi Germany."

Jan. 10: Judge Andrew Napolitano, senior judicial analyst at Fox News, suggested in a column on Fox News.com that, "If the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto had had the firepower and the ammunition that the Nazis did, some of Poland might have stayed free and more persons would have survived the Holocaust.

Jan. 15: Former Major League pitcher John Rocker wrote on WorldNetDaily.com about what he described as "…the undeniable fact that the Holocaust would never have taken place had the Jewish citizenry of Hitler's Germany had the right to bear arms and defend themselves with those arms."

Jan. 23: Sean Hannity, discussing the gun debate, stated that, “We don’t talk a lot about — what were the intentions of our founders and framers? And we have Stalin, um, we have Hitler, we have countries, tyrannical. They talked a lot about that."

Fox, Drudge and WND did not immediately respond to requests from TheWrap for comment.